A look at some struggles across the country in schools

I have had a few articles come across my timelines this morning that give some idea of how things are out there, as schools gear up to go back to school in August in many places.

• the North Dakota board that licenses teachers is asking the governor to waive the requirement that student teachers teach under a licensed teacher. That would mean the student teachers would be the teacher of record under their student teaching. The board cited the lack of teachers as putting the state in "imminent peril."
  
  
• You may have been following the evolving saga of Central Bucks School District in Pennsylvania, where a not-actually-even-conservative majority has been banning books, spending significant money to attempt to diffuse criticism of their anti-LGBTQ stances, and so forth since the board turned over. They just gave their superintendent a nearly 40% raise, making the superintendent of the 17,000 student district the second highest paid in Pennsylvania. 
  
  
• The Texas school funding system has long been...I don't think "a disaster" is too strong a word. Kudos to Texas Monthly for this excellent piece which both dives into the calculation (and why it doesn't work) and takes a deep look at what it looks like for Fort Davis Independent School District: 128 kids, 2,265 miles. 
  
  
• Mount Airy School Board in North Carolina recently censured one of their members for posting on Facebook an anti-LGBTQ meme. I'm sharing mostly due to the last line of the article, though: 
  

  He is one of several Christians who have expressed interest in “reclaiming the rainbow” from the LGBTQ+ community. In the Bible, God displayed a rainbow as a peace offering after drowning nearly all the humans on Earth for being evil.